CAMPING& 
TRAMPING 

ROOSliELOr 

BY .BiiNf Bljii^tlSIIS 



' i.SM^iA,i*i**ta 




Copyright W ^^j/ ^ 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 




THE PRESIDENT ON GLACIER POINT, YOSEMITE VALLEY 

From stereograph, copyright 1905, by Underwood & Underwood, New York 



CAMPING & TRAMPING 
WITH ROOSEVELT 



BY 



JOHN BURROUGHS 



WITH ILLUSTRATIONS 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

1907 



CoWu "(1. 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
Two CoDies Received 

SEP 25 1907 

/Copyright Entry 

CLASS /^ XXc. ifo. 

COPY A. 






COPYRXGHT 1906 BY HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. 

COPYRIGHT 1907 BY THE OUTLOOK COMPANY 

COPYRXGHT 1907 BY JOHN BURROUGHS 



Published October iQOfj 



■^ 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

The President on Glacier Point, Yosemite 

Valley Frontispiece 

Arrival at Gardiner, Montana lo 

The President, Mr. Burroughs and Secretary 

Loeb 24 

The President in the Bear Country . . . . 38 

Mr. Burroughs's Favorite Pastime .... 50 

Sunrise in the Yellowstone 64 

The President on a Trail 72 

The President's Home on Sagamore Hill, show- 
ing ADDITION known AS THE TrOPHY RoOM . . 82 

A Bit of Woodland on the Slope towards Oys- 
ter Bay 88 

A Path in the Woods leading to Cold Spring 

Harbor 92 

A Yearling in the Apple Orchard .... 98 

Hallway, Sagamore Hill io6 



INTRODUCTION 

This little volume really needs no intro- 
duction; the, two sketches of which it is 
made explain and, I hope, justify them- 
selves. But there is one phase of the 
President's many-sided character upon 
which I should like to lay especial em- 
phasis, namely, his natural history bent 
and knowledge. Amid all his absorbing 
interests and masterful activities in other 
fields, his interest and his authority in 
practical natural history are by no means 
the least. I long ago had very direct proof 
of this statement. In some of my English 
sketches, following a visit to that island 
in 1882, 1 had, rather by implication than 
by positive statement, inclined to the 
opinion that the European forms of ani- 
mal life were, as a rule, larger and more 
hardy and prolific than the corresponding 

vii 



INTRODUCTION 

forms in this country. Roosevelt could 
not let this statement or suggestion go 
unchallenged, and the letter which I re- 
ceived from him in 1892, touching these 
things, is of double interest at this time, 
as showing one phase of his radical 
Americanism, while it exhibits him as a 
thoroughgoing naturalist. I am sure my 
readers will welcome the gist of this let- 
ter. After some preliminary remarks he 
says : — 

**The point of which I am speaking 
is where you say that the Old World 
forms of animal life are coarser, stronger, 
fiercer, and more fertile than those of the 
New World." (My statement was not 
quite so sweeping as this.) "Now I don't 
think that this is so; at least, comparing 
the forms which are typical of North 
America and of northern Asia and 
Europe, which together form but one 

province of animal life. 

viii 



INTRODUCTION 

*'Many animals and birds which in- 
crease very fast in new countries, and 
which are commonly spoken of as Euro- 
pean in their origin, are really as alien 
to Europe as to their new homes. Thus 
the rabbit, rat, and mouse are just as 
truly interlopers in England as in the 
United States and Australia, having 
moved thither apparently within historic 
times, the rabbit from North Africa, the 
others from southern Asia ; and one could 
no more generalize upon the comparative 
weakness of the American fauna from 
these cases of intruders than one could 
generalize from them upon the compara- 
tive weakness of the British, German, 
and French wild animals. Our wood 
mouse or deer mouse retreats before the 
ordinary house mouse in exactly the same 
way that the European wood mouse does, 
and not a whit more. Our big wood rat 
stands in the same relation to the house 

ix 



INTRODUCTION 

rat. Casting aside these cases, it seems 
to me, looking at the mammals, that it 
would be quite impossible to generalize 
as to whether those of the Old or the New 
World are more fecund, are the fiercest, 
the hardiest, or the strongest. A great 
many cases could be cited on both sides. 
Our moose and caribou are, in certain of 
their varieties, rather larger than the Old 
World forms of the same species. If 
there is any difference between the beavers 
of the two countries, it is in the same di- 
rection. So with the great family of the 
field mice. The largest true arvicola 
seems to be the yellow-cheeked mouse of 
Hudson's Bay, and the biggest represent- 
ative of the family on either continent is 
the muskrat. In most of its varieties the 
wolf of North America seems to be in- 
ferior in strength and courage to that of 
northern Europe and Asia ; but the direct 
reverse is true with the grizzly bear, which 



INTRODUCTION 

is merely a somewhat larger and fiercer 
variety of the common European brown 
bear. On the whole, the Old World bison, 
or so-called aurochs, appears to be some- 
what more formidable than its American 
brother; but the difference against the 
latter is not anything like as great as the 
difference in favor of the American wapiti, 
which is nothing but a giant represent- 
ative of the comparatively puny Euro- 
pean stag. So with the red fox. The fox 
of New York is about the size of that 
of France, and inferior in size to that of 
Scotland; the latter in turn is inferior in 
size to the big fox of the upper Missouri, 
while the largest of all comes from British 
America. There is no basis for the belief 
that the red fox was imported here from 
Europe; its skin was a common article 
of trade with the Canadian fur traders 
from the earliest times. On the other 
hand, the European lynx is much bigger 
xi 



INTRODUCTION 

than the American. The weasels afford 
cases in point, showing how hard it is to 
make a general law on the subject. The 
American badger is very much smaller 
than the European, and the American 
otter very much larger than the European 
otter. Our pine marten, or sable, com- 
pared with that of Europe, shows the 
very qualities of which you speak; that 
is, its skull is slenderer, the bones are 
somewhat lighter, the teeth less stout, the 
form showing more grace and less strength. 
But curiously enough this is reversed, 
with even greater emphasis, in the minks 
of the two continents, the American being 
much the largest and strongest, with 
stouter teeth, bigger bones, and a stronger 
animal in every way. The little weasel is 
on the whole smaller here, while the big 
weasel, or stoat, is, in some of its varieties 
at least, largest on this side; and, of the 
true weasels, the largest of all is the so- 
xii 



INTRODUCTION 

called fisher, a purely American beast, a 
fierce and hardy animal which habitually 
preys upon as hard fighting a creature as 
the raccoon, and which could eat all the 
Asiatic and European varieties of weasels 
without an effort. 

"About birds I should be far less com- 
petent to advance arguments, and es- 
pecially, my dear sir, to you; but it seems 
to me that two of the most self-asserting 
and hardiest of our families of birds are 
the tyrant flycatchers, of which the king- 
bird is chief, and the blackbirds, or 
grackles, with the meadow lark at their 
head, both characteristically American. 

**Did you ever look over the medical 
statistics of the half million men drafted 
during the Civil War ? They include men 
of every race and color, and from every 
country of Europe, and from every State 
in the Union; and so many men were 
measured that the average of the mea- 

xiii 



INTRODUCTION 

surements is probably pretty fair. From 
these it would appear that the physical 
type in the Eastern States had undoubt- 
edly degenerated. The man from New 
York or New England, unless he came 
from the lumbering districts, though as 
tall as the Englishman or Irishman, was 
distinctly lighter built, and especially was 
narrower across the chest ; but the finest 
men physically of all were the Kentuck- 
ians and Tennesseeans. After them came 
the Scandinavians, then the Scotch, then 
the people from several of the Western 
States, such as Wisconsin and Minnesota, 
then the Irish, then the Germans, then 
the English, etc. The decay of vitality^) 
especially as shown in the decreasing ' 
fertility of the New England and, indeed, 
New York stock, is very alarming; but 
the most prolific peoples on this conti- 
nent, whether of native or foreign origin, 
are the native whites of the southern 
xiv 



INTRODUCTION 

Alleghany region in Kentucky and Ten- 
nessee, the Virginians, and the Carolin- 
ians, and also the French of Canada. 

**It will be difficult to frame a general 
law of fecundity in comparing the effects 
upon human life of long residence on the 
two continents when we see that the 
Frenchman in Canada is healthy and 
enormously fertile, while the old French 
stock is at the stationary point in France, 
the direct reverse being the case when 
the English of Old and of New England 
are compared, and the decision being 
again reversed if we compare the English 
with the mountain whites of the Southern 
States/' 



CAMPING WITH 
PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



CAMPING WITH 
PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 

At the time I made the trip to Yellow- 
stone Park with President Roosevelt in 
the spring of 1903, I promised some 
friends to write up my impressions of 
the President and of the Park, but I have 
been slow in getting around to it. The 
President himself, having the absolute 
leisure and peace of the White House, 
wrote his account of the trip nearly two 
years ago! But with the stress and strain 
of my life at ''Slabsides," — adminis- 
tering the affairs of so many of the wild 
creatures of the woods about me, — I 
have not till this blessed season (fall of 
1905) found the time to put on record an 
account of the most interesting thing I 
saw in that wonderful land, which, of 
course, was the President himself. 
3 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

When I accepted his invitation I was 
well aware that during the journey I 
should be in a storm centre most of the 
time, which is not always a pleasant 
prospect to a man of my habits and dis- 
position. The President himself is a good 
deal of a storm, — a man of such abound- 
ing energy and ceaseless activity that he 
sets everything in motion around him 
wherever he goes. But I knew he would 
be pretty well occupied on his way to the 
Park in speaking to eager throngs and in 
receiving personal and political homage 
in the towns and cities we were to pass 
through. But when all this was over, and 
I found myself with him in the wilder- 
ness of the Park, with only the superin- 
tendent and a few attendants to help take 
up his tremendous personal impact, hov/ 
was it likely to fare with a non-strenuous 
person like myself? I asked. I had visions 
of snow six and seven feet deep, where 
4 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

traveling could be done only upon snow- 
shoes, and I had never had the things on 
my feet in my life. If the infernal fires 
beneath, that keep the pot boiling so 
furiously in the Park, should melt the 
snows, I could see the party tearing along 
on horseback at a wolf-hunt pace over a 
rough country; and as I had not been 
on a horse's back since the President 
was born, how would it be likely to fare 
with me then ? 

I had known the President several 
years before he became famous, and we 
had had some correspondence on subjects 
of natural history. His interest in such 
themes is always very fresh and keen, 
and the main motive of his visit to the 
Park at this time was to see and study in 
its semi-domesticated condition the great 
game which he had so often hunted dur- 
ing his ranch days; and he was kind 
enough to think it would be an additional 
5 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

pleasure to see it with a nature-lover like 
myself. For my own part, I knew nothing 
about big game, but I knew there was no 
man in the country with whom I should 
so like to see it as Roosevelt. 

Some of our newspapers reported that 
the President intended to hunt in the 
Park. A woman in Vermont wrote me, 
to protest against the hunting, and hoped 
I would teach the President to love the 
animals as much as I did, — as if he did 
not love them much more, because his 
love is founded upon knowledge, and 
because they had been a part of his life. 
She did not know that I was then cherish- 
ing the secret hope that I might be al- 
lowed to shoot a cougar or bobcat; but 
this fun did not come to me. The Presi- 
dent said, ''I will not fire a gun in the 
Park; then I shall have no explanations 
to make." Yet once I did hear him say 
in the wilderness, **I feel as if I ought to 
6 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

keep the camp in meat. I always have." 
I regretted that he could not do so on this 
occasion. 

I have never been disturbed by the 
President's hunting trips. It is to such 
men as he that the big game legitimately 
belongs, — men who regard it from the 
point of view of the naturalist as well as 
from that of the sportsman, who are in- 
terested in its preservation, and who share 
with the world the delight they experience 
in the chase. Such a hunter as Roosevelt 
is as far removed from the game-butcher 
as day is from night; and as for his kill- 
ing of the *' varmints,'' — bears, cougars, 
and bobcats, — the fewer of these there 
are, the better for the useful and beautiful 
game. 

The cougars, or mountain lions, in the 
Park certainly needed killing. The super- 
intendent reported that he had seen where 
they had slain nineteen elk, and we saw 
7 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

where they had killed a deer and dragged 
its body across the trail. Of course, the 
President would not now on his hunting 
trips shoot an elk or a deer except to 
"keep the camp in meat/' and for this 
purpose it is as legitimate as to slay a 
sheep or a steer for the table at home. 

We left Washington on April i, and 
strung several of the larger Western cities 
on our thread of travel, — Chicago, Mil- 
waukee, Madison, St. Paul, Minneapolis, 
— as well as many lesser towns, in each 
of which the President made an address, 
sometimes brief, on a few occasions of an 
hour or more. 

He gave himself very freely and heartily 
to the people wherever he went. He could 
easily match their Western cordiality 
and good-fellowship. Wherever his train 
stopped, crowds soon gathered, or had 
already gathered, to welcome him. His 
advent made a holiday in each town he 
8 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

visited. At all the principal stops the 
usual programme was : first, his reception 
by the committee of citizens appointed to 
receive him, — they usually boarded his 
private car, and were one by one intro- 
duced to him; then a drive through the 
town with a concourse of carriages; then 
to the hall or open-air platform, where 
he spoke to the assembled throng; then 
to lunch or dinner; and then back to the 
train, and off for the next stop, — a round 
of hand-shaking, carriage-driving, speech- 
making each day. He usually spoke 
from eight to ten times every twenty-four 
hours, sometimes for only a few minutes 
from the rear platform of his private car, 
at others for an hour or more in some 
large hall. In Chicago, Milwaukee, and 
St. Paul, elaborate banquets were given 
him and his party, and on each occasion 
he delivered a carefully prepared speech 
upon questions that involved the policy 
9 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

of his administration. The throng that 
greeted him in the vast Auditorium in 
Chicago — that rose and waved and 
waved again — was one of the grandest 
human spectacles I ever witnessed. 

In Milwaukee the dense cloud of to- 
bacco smoke that presently filled the 
large hall after the feasting was over was 
enough to choke any speaker, but it did 
not seem to choke the President, though 
he does not use tobacco in any form him- 
self; nor was there anything foggy about 
his utterances on that occasion upon 
legislative control of the trusts. 

In St. Paul the city was inundated 
with humanity, — a vast human tide 
that left the middle of the streets bare as 
our line of carriages moved slowly along, 
but that rose up in solid walls of town 
and prairie humanity on the sidewalks 
and city dooryards. How hearty and 
happy the myriad faces looked! At one 

10 




< 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

point I spied in the throng on the curb- 
stone a large silk banner that bore my 
own name as the title of some society. I 
presently saw that it was borne by half 
a dozen anxious and expectant-looking 
schoolgirls with braids down their backs. 
As my carriage drew near them, they 
pressed their way through the throng 
and threw a large bouquet of flowers into 
my lap. I think it would be hard to say 
who blushed the deeper, the girls or my- 
self. It was the first time I had ever had 
flowers showered upon me in public; and 
then, maybe, I felt that on such an occa- 
sion I was only a minor side issue, and 
public recognition was not called for. 
But the incident pleased the President. 
*'I saw that banner and those flowers," he 
said afterwards; '*and I was delighted to 
see you honored that way." But I fear I 
have not to this day thanked the Monroe 

School of St. Paul for that pretty attention. 
II 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

The time of the passing of the presi- 
dential train seemed well known, even 
on the Dakota prairies. At one point I 
remember a little brown schoolhouse 
stood not far off, and near the track the 
school-ma'am, with her flock, drawn up 
in line. We were at luncheon, but the 
President caught a glimpse ahead through 
the window, and quickly took in the 
situation. With napkin in hand, he 
rushed out on the platform and waved to 
them. ** Those children," he said, as he 
came back, "wanted to see the President 
of the United States, and I could not dis- 
appoint them. They may never have 
another chance. What a deep impression 
such things make when we are young!" 

At some point in the Dakotas we picked 
up the former foreman of his ranch and 
another cowboy friend of the old days, 
and they rode with the President in his 
private car for several hours. He was as 

12 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

happy with them as a schoolboy ever was 
in meeting old chums. He beamed with 
dehght all over. The life which those 
men represented, and of which he had 
himself once formed a part, meant so 
much to him; it had entered into the very 
marrow of his being, and I could see the 
joy of it all shining in his face as he sat 
and lived parts of it over again with those 
men that day. He bubbled with laughter 
continually. The men, I thought, seemed 
a little embarrassed by his open-handed 
cordiality and good-fellowship. He him- 
self evidently wanted to forget the present, 
and to live only in the memory of those 
wonderful ranch days, — that free, hardy, 
adventurous life upon the plains. It all 
came back to him with a rush when he 
found himself alone with these heroes of 
the rope and the stirrup. How much 
more keen his appreciation was, and how 
much quicker his memory, than theirs! 
13 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

He was constantly recalling to their 
minds incidents which they had forgotten, 
and the names of horses and dogs which 
had escaped them. His subsequent life, 
instead of making dim the memory of his 
ranch days, seemed to have made it more 
vivid by contrast. 

When they had gone I said to him, ''I 
think your affection for those men very 
beautiful." 

'*How could I help it?'' he said. 

"Still, few men in your station could 
or would go back and renew such friend- 
ships." 

*'Then I pity them," he replied. 

He said afterwards that his ranch life 
had been the making of him. It had 
built him up and hardened him physi- 
cally, and it had opened his eyes to the 
wealth of manly character among the 
plainsmen and cattlemen. 

Had he not gone West, he said, he 
14 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

never would have raised the Rough Riders 
regiment ; and had he not raised that 
regiment and gone to the Cuban War, he 
would not have been made governor of 
New York; and had not this happened, 
the politicians would not unwittingly 
have made his rise to the Presidency so 
inevitable. There is no doubt, I think, 
that he would have got there some day; 
but without the chain of events above 
outlined, his rise could not have been so 
rapid. 

Our train entered the Bad Lands of 
North Dakota in the early evening twi- 
light, and the President stood on the rear 
platform of his car, gazing wistfully upon 
the scene. ''I know all this country like a 
book," he said. ^'I have ridden over it, 
and hunted over it, and tramped over it, 
in all seasons and weather, and it looks 
like home to me. My old ranch is not 
far off. We shall soon reach Medora, 
15 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

which was my station." It was plain to 
see that that strange, forbidding-looking 
landscape, hills and valleys to eastern 
eyes, utterly demoralized and gone to the 
bad, — flayed, fantastic, treeless, a riot 
of naked clay slopes, chimney-like buttes, 
and dry coulees, — was in his eyes a land 
of almost pathetic interest. There were 
streaks of good pasturage here and there 
where his cattle used to graze, and where 
the deer and the pronghorn used to 
linger. 

When we reached Medora, where the 
train was scheduled to stop an hour, it 
was nearly dark, but the whole town and 
country round had turned out to welcome 
their old townsman. After much hand- 
shaking, the committee conducted us 
down to a little hall, where the President 
stood on a low platform, and made a 
short address to the standing crowd that 
filled the place. Then some flashlight pic- 
i6 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

tures were taken by the local photogra- 
pher, after which the President stepped 
down, and, while the people filed past 
him, shook hands with every man, wo- 
man, and child of them, calling many of 
them by name, and greeting them all 
most cordially. I recall one grizzled old 
frontiersman whose hand he grasped, 
calling him by name, and saying, ''How 
well I remember you! You once mended 
my gunlock for me, — put on a new 
hammer." ''Yes," said the delighted old 
fellow; "I'm the man, Mr. President." 
He was among his old neighbors once 
more, and the pleasure of the meeting 
was very obvious on both sides. I heard 
one of the women tell him they were going 
to have a dance presently, and ask him 
if he would not stay and open it! The 
President laughingly excused himself, and 
said his train had to leave on schedule 
time, and his time was nearly up. I 
17 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

thought of the incident in his *' Ranch 
Life/' in which he says he once opened a 
cowboy ball with the wife of a Minnesota 
man, who danced opposite, and who had 
recently shot a bullying Scotchman. He 
says the scene reminded him of the ball 
where Bret Harte's heroine ''went down 
the middle with the man that shot Sandy 
Magee/' 

Before reaching Medora he had told 
me many anecdotes of "Hell- Roaring 
Bill Jones," and had said I should see 
him. But it turned out that Hell- Roaring 
Bill had begun to celebrate the coming of 
the President too early in the day, and 
when we reached Medora he was not in a 
presentable condition. I forget now how 
he had earned his name, but no doubt he 
had come honestly by it; it was a part of 
his history, as was that of "The Pike," 
"Cold-Turkey Bill," "Hash-Knife Joe," 
and other classic heroes of the frontier. 
i8 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

It is curious how certain things go to 
the bad in the Far West, or a certain pro- 
portion of them, — bad lands, bad horses, 
and bad men. And it is a degree of bad- 
ness that the East has no conception of, 

— land that looks as raw and unnatural 
as if time had never laid its shaping and 
softening hand upon it; horses that, when 
mounted, put their heads to the ground 
and their heels in the air, and, squealing 
defiantly, resort to the most diabolically- 
ingenious tricks to shake off or to kill 
their riders; and 'men who amuse them- 
selves in bar-rooms by shooting about 
the feet of a ''tenderfoot" to make him 
dance, or who ride along the street and 
shoot at every one in sight. Just as the 
old plutonic fires come to the surface out 
there in the Rockies, and hint very 
strongly of the infernal regions, so a kind 
of Satanic element in men and animals 

— an underlying devilishness — crops 

19 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

out, and we have the border ruffian and 
the bucking broncho. 

The President told of an Englishman 
on a hunting trip in the West, who, being 
an expert horseman at home, scorned the 
idea that he could not ride any of their 
"grass-fed ponies." So they gave him a 
bucking broncho. He was soon lying on 
the ground, much stunned. When he 
could speak, he said, *'I should not have 
minded him, you know, but 'e 'ides 'is 
ead. 

Atone place in Dakota the train stopped 
to take water while we were at lunch. A 
crowd soon gathered, and the President 
went out to greet them. We could hear 
his voice, and the cheers and laughter of 
the crowd. And then we heard him say, 
"Well, good-by, I must go now." Still 
he did not come. Then we heard more 
talking and laughing, and another "good- 
by," and yet he did not come. Then I 

20 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

went out to see what had happened. I 
found the President down on the ground 
shaking hands with the whole lot of them. 
Some one had reached up to shake his 
hand as he was about withdrawing, and 
this had been followed by such eagerness 
on the part of the rest of the people to do 
likewise, that the President had instantly 
got down to gratify them. Had the secret 
service men known it, they would have 
been in a pickle. We probably have never 
had a President who responded more 
freely and heartily to the popular liking 
for him than Roosevelt. The crowd al- 
ways seem to be in love with him the 
moment they see him and hear his voice. 
And it is not by reason of any arts of elo- 
quence, or charm of address, but by rea- 
son of his inborn heartiness and sincerity, 
and his genuine manliness. The people 
feel his quality at once. In Bermuda last 
winter I met a Catholic priest who had 

21 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

sat on the platform at some place in New 
England very near the President while 
he was speaking, and who said, ''The 
man had not spoken three minutes before 
I loved him, and had any one tried to 
molest him, I could have torn him to 
pieces." It is the quality in the man that 
instantly inspires such a liking as this in 
strangers that will, I am sure, safeguard 
him in all public places. 

I once heard him say that he did not 
like to be addressed as "His Excellency;" 
he added laughingly, ''They might just 
as well call me 'His Transparency,' for all 
I care." It is this transparency, this direct 
out-and-out, unequivocal character of 
him that is one source of his popularity. 
The people do love transparency, — all 
of them but the politicians. 

A friend of his one day took him to 
task for some mistake he had made in one 
of his appointments. *'My dear sir," 

22 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

replied the President, ''where you know 
of one mistake I have made, I know of 
ten/' How such candor must make the 
poHticians shiver! 

I have said that I stood in dread of the 
necessity of snowshoeing in the Park, 
and, in heu of that, of horseback riding. 
Yet when we reached Gardiner, the en- 
trance to the Park, on that bright, crisp 
April morning, with no snow in sight save 
that on the mountain-tops, and found 
Major Pitcher and Captain Chittenden 
at the head of a squad of soldiers, with a 
fine saddle-horse for the President, and 
an ambulance drawn by two span of 
mules for me, I confess that I experienced 
just a slight shade of mortification. I 
thought they might have given me the 
option of the saddle or the ambulance. 
Yet I entered the vehicle as if it was just 
what I had been expecting. 

The President and his escort, with a 
23 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

cloud of cowboys hovering in the rear, 
were soon off at a lively pace, and my 
ambulance followed close, and at a lively 
pace, too; so lively that I soon found my- 
self gripping the seat with both hands. 
''Well," I said to myself, ''they are giving 
me a regular Western send-off;" and I 
thought, as the ambulance swayed from 
side to side, that it would suit me just as 
well if my driver did not try to keep up 
with the presidential procession. The 
driver and his mules were shut off from 
me by a curtain, but, looking ahead out 
of the sides of the vehicle, I saw two good- 
sized logs lying across our course. Surely, 
I thought (and barely had time to think), 
he will avoid these. But he did not, and 
as we passed over them I was nearly 
thrown through the top of the ambulance. 
"This is a lively send-off," I said, rubbing 
my bruises with one hand, while I clung 
to the seat with the other. Presently I 
24 




< 5 

Si "^ 

E3 



::5 3: 



g^ 



-5 o" 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

saw the cowboys scrambling up the bank 
as if to get out of our way; then the Presi- 
dent on his fine gray stallion scrambling 
up the bank with his escort, and looking 
ominously in my direction, as we thun- 
dered by. 

**Well," I said, *'this is indeed a novel 
ride; for once in my life I have side- 
tracked the President of the United 
States ! I am given the right of way over 
all." On we tore, along the smooth, hard 
road, and did not slacken our pace till, 
at the end of a mile or two, we began to 
mount the hill toward Fort Yellowstone. 
And not till we reached the fort did I 
learn that our mules had run away. They 
had been excited beyond control by the 
presidential cavalcade, and the driver, 
finding he could not hold them, had 
aimed only to keep them in the road, 
and we very soon had the road all to 
ourselves. 

25 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

Fort Yellowstone is at Mammoth Hot 
Springs, where one gets his first view of 
the characteristic scenery of the Park, — 
huge, boiling springs with their columns 
of vapor, and the first characteristic odors 
which suggest the traditional infernal 
regions quite as much as the boiling and 
steaming water does. One also gets a 
taste of a much more rarefied air than he 
has been used to, and finds himself pant- 
ing for breath on a very slight exertion. 
The Mammoth Hot Springs have built 
themselves up an enormous mound that 
stands there above the village on the side 
of the mountain, terraced and scalloped 
and fluted, and suggesting some vitreous 
formation, or rare carving of enormous, 
many-colored precious stones. It looks 
quite unearthly, and, though the devil's 
frying pan, and ink pot, and the Stygian 
caves are not far off, the suggestion is of 
something celestial rather than of the 
26 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

nether regions, — a vision of jasper walls, 
and of amethyst battlements. 

With Captain Chittenden I dimbed to 
the top, stepping over the rills and creeks 
of steaming hot water, and looked at the 
marvelously clear, cerulean, but boiling, 
pools on the summit. The water seemed 
as unearthly in its beauty and purity as 
the gigantic sculpturing that held it. 

The Stygian caves are still farther up 
the mountain, — little pockets in the 
rocks, or well-holes in the ground at your 
feet, filled with deadly carbon dioxide. 
We saw birds' feathers and quills in all of 
them. The birds hop into them, prob- 
ably in quest of food or seeking shelter, 
and they never come out. We saw the 
body of a martin on the bank of one hole. 
Into one we sank a lighted torch, and it 
was extinguished as quickly as if we had 
dropped it into water. Each cave or niche 
is a death valley on a small scale. Near by 
27 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

we came upon a steaming pool, or lakelet, 
of an acre or more in extent. A pair of 
mallard ducks were swimming about in 
one end of it, — the cool end. When we 
approached, they swam slowly over into 
the warmer water. As they progressed, 
the water got hotter and hotter, and the 
ducks' discomfort was evident. Presently 
they stopped, and turned towards us, 
half appealingly, as I thought. They 
could go no farther; would we please 
come no nearer ? As I took another step 
or two, up they rose and disappeared 
over the hill. Had they gone to the ex- 
treme end of the pool, we could have had 
boiled mallard for dinner. 

Another novel spectacle was at night, 
or near sundown, when the deer came 
down from the hills into the streets and 
ate hay, a few yards from the officers' 
quarters, as unconcernedly as so many 
domestic sheep. This they had been 
28 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

doing all winter, and they kept it up 
till May, at times a score or more of 
them profiting thus on the government's 
bounty. When the sundown gun was 
fired a couple of hundred yards away, 
they gave a nervous start, but kept on 
with their feeding. The antelope and elk 
and mountain sheep had not yet grown 
bold enough to accept Uncle Sam's charity 
in that way. 

The President wanted all the freedom 
and solitude possible while in the Park, 
so all newspaper men and other strangers 
were excluded. Even the secret service 
men and his physician and private secre- 
taries were left at Gardiner. He craved 
once more to be alone with nature; he 
was evidently hungry for the wild and 
the aboriginal, — a hunger that seems to 
come upon him regularly at least once a 
year, and drives him forth on his hunting 

trips for big game in the West. 
29 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

We spent two weeks in the Park, and 
had fair weather, bright, crisp days, and 
clear, freezing nights. The first week 
we occupied three camps that had been 
prepared, or partly prepared, for us in 
the northeast corner of the Park, in the 
region drained by the Gardiner River, 
where there was but little snow, and 
which we reached on horseback. 

The second week we visited the geyser 
region, which lies a thousand feet or more 
higher, and where the snow was still five 
or six feet deep. This part of the journey 
was made in big sleighs, each drawn by 
two span of horses. 

On the horseback excursion, which 
involved only about fifty miles of riding, 
we had a mule pack train, and Sibley 
tents and stoves, with quite a retinue of 
camp laborers, a lieutenant and an or- 
derly or two, and a guide, Billy Hofer. 

The first camp was in a wild, rocky, 
30 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

and picturesque gorge on the Yellow- 
stone, about ten miles from the fort. A 
slight indisposition, the result of luxurious 
living, with no wood to chop or to saw, 
and no hills to climb, as at home, pre- 
vented me from joining the party till the 
third day. Then Captain Chittenden 
drove me eight miles in a buggy. About 
two miles from camp we came to a picket 
of two or three soldiers, where my big 
bay was in waiting for me. I mounted 
him confidently, and, guided by an or- 
derly, took the narrow, winding trail 
toward camp. Except for an hour's riding 
the day before with Captain Chittenden, 
I had not been on a horse's back for 
nearly fifty years, and I had not spent as 
much as a day in the saddle during my 
youth. That first sense of a live, spirited, 
powerful animal beneath you, at whose 
mercy you are, — you, a pedestrian all 
your days, — with gullies and rocks and 
31 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

logs to cross, and deep chasms opening 
close beside you, is not a little disturbing. 
But my big bay did his part well, and I 
did not lose my head or my nerve, as we 
cautiously made our way along the nar- 
row path on the side of the steep gorge, 
with a foaming torrent rushing along at 
its foot, nor yet when we forded the rocky 
and rapid Yellowstone. A misstep or a 
stumble on the part of my steed, and 
probably the first bubble of my confidence 
would have been shivered at once; but 
this did not happen, and in due time we 
reached the group of tents that formed 
the President's camp. 

The situation was delightful, — no 
snow, scattered pine trees, a secluded 
valley, rocky heights, and the clear, 
ample, trouty waters of the Yellowstone. 
The President was not in camp. In the 
morning he had stated his wish to go 
alone into the wilderness. Major Pitcher 
32 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

very naturally did not quite like the idea, 
and wished to send an orderly with him. 

"No/' said the President. *Tut me 
up a lunch, and let me go alone. I will 
surely come back." 

And back he surely came. It was 
about five o'clock when he came briskly 
down the path from the east to the camp. 
It came out that he had tramped about 
eighteen miles through a very rough 
country. The day before, he and the 
major had located a band of several hun- 
dred elk on a broad, treeless hillside, and 
his purpose was to find those elk, and 
creep up on them, and eat his lunch 
under their very noses. And this he did, 
spending an hour or more within fifty 
yards of them. He came back looking as 
fresh as when he started, and at night, 
sitting before the big camp fire, related 
his adventure, and talked with his usual 
emphasis and copiousness of many things. 
33 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

He told me of the birds he had seen or 
heard; among them he had heard one 
that was new to him. From his descrip- 
tion I told him I thought it was Town- 
send's solitaire, a bird I much wanted to 
see and hear. I had heard the West India 
solitaire, — one of the most impressive 
songsters I ever heard, — and I wished 
to compare our Western form with it. 

The next morning we set out for our 
second camp, ten or a dozen miles away, 
and in reaching it passed over much of 
the ground the President had traversed 
the day before. As we came to a wild, 
rocky place above a deep chasm of the 
river, with a few scattered pine trees, the 
President said, ''It was right here that I 
heard that strange bird song." We paused 
a moment. "And there it is now ! " he 
exclaimed. 

Sure enough, there was the solitaire 
singing from the top of a small c^dar, — 
34 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

a bright, animated, eloquent song, but 
without the richness and magic of the 
song of the tropical species. We hitched 
our horses, and followed the bird up as it 
flew from tree to tree. The President was 
as eager to see and hear it as I was. It 
seemed very shy, and we only caught 
glimpses of it. In form and color it much 
resembles its West India cousin, and 
suggests our catbird. It ceased to sing 
when we pursued it. It is a bird found 
only in the wilder and higher parts of the 
Rockies. My impression was that its 
song did not quite merit the encomiums 
that have been pronounced upon it. 

At this point, I saw amid the rocks my 
first and only Rocky Mountain wood- 
chucks, and, soon after we had resumed 
our journey, our first blue grouse, — a 
number of them like larger partridges. 
Occasionally we would come upon black- 
tailed deer, standing or lying down in the 
35 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

bushes, their large ears at attention being 
the first thing to catch the eye. They 
would often allow us to pass within a few 
rods of them without showing alarm. 
Elk horns were scattered all over this 
part of the Park, and we passed several 
old carcasses of dead elk that had prob- 
ably died a natural death. 

In a grassy bottom at the foot of a 
steep hill, while the President and I were 
dismounted, and noting the pleasing 
picture which our pack train of fifteen or 
twenty mules made filing along the side 
of a steep grassy slope, — a picture which 
he has preserved in his late volume, ''Out- 
Door Pastimes of an American Hunter," 
— our attention was attracted by plain- 
tive, musical, bird-like chirps that rose 
from the grass about us. I was almost 
certain it was made by a bird; the Presi- 
dent was of like opinion; and we kicked 
about in the tufts of grass, hoping to flush 
36 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

the bird. Now here, now there, arose 
this sharp, but bird-like note. Finally, 
we found that it was made by a species of 
gopher, whose holes we soon discovered. 
What its specific name is I do not 
know, but it should be called the sing- 
ing gopher. 

Our destination this day was a camp 
on Cottonwood Creek, near *' Hell-Roar- 
ing Creek." As we made our way in the 
afternoon along a broad, open, grassy 
valley, I saw a horseman come galloping 
over the hill to our right, starting up a 
band of elk as he came; riding across the 
plain, he wheeled his horse, and, with the 
military salute, joined our party. He 
proved to be a government scout, called 
the ''Duke of Hell Roaring," — an edu- 
cated officer from the Austrian army, 
who, for some unknown reason, had ex- 
iled himself here in this out-of-the-way 
part of the world. He was a man in his 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

prime, of fine, military look and bearing. 
After conversing a few moments with 
the President and Major Pitcher, he rode 
rapidly away. 

Our second camp, which we reached in 
mid-afternoon, was in the edge of the 
woods on the banks of a fine, large trout 
stream, where ice and snow still lingered 
in patches. I tried for trout in the head of 
a large, partly open pool, but did not get 
a rise; too much ice in the stream, I con- 
cluded. Very soon my attention was at- 
tracted by a strange note, or call, in the 
spruce woods. The President had also 
noticed it, and, with me, wondered what 
made it. Was it bird or beast ? Billy 
Hofer said he thought it was an owl, but 
the sound in no way suggested an owl, 
and the sun was shining brightly. It was 
a sound such as a boy might make by 
blowing in the neck of an empty bottle. 
Presently we heard it beyond us on the 
38 




THE PRESIDENT IN THE BEAR COUNTRY 

From stereograph, copyright 1905, by Underwood & Underwood, New York 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

Other side of the creek, which was pretty 
good proof that the creature had wings. 

*' Let's go run that bird down/' said 
the President to me. 

So off we started across a small, open, 
snow-streaked plain, toward the woods 
beyond it. We soon decided that the bird 
was on the top of one of a group of tall 
spruces. After much skipping about over 
logs and rocks, and much craning of our 
necks, we made him out on the peak of 
a spruce. I imitated his call, when he 
turned his head down toward us, but we 
could not make out what he was. 

**Why did we not think to bring the 
glasses ? " said the President. 

"I will run and get them," I replied. 

*'No," said he, ''you stay here and keep 
that bird treed, and I will fetch them.'* 

So off he went like a boy, and was very 
soon back with the glasses. We quickly 
made out that it was indeed an owl, — 
39 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

the pigmy owl, as it turned out, — not 
much larger than a bluebird. I think the 
President was as pleased as if we had 
bagged some big game. He had never 
seen the bird before. 

Throughout the trip I found his inter- 
est in bird life very keen, and his eye and 
ear remarkably quick. He usually saw 
the bird or heard its note as quickly as I 
did, — and I had nothing else to think 
about, and had been teaching my eye and 
ear the trick of it for over fifty years. Of 
course, his training as a big-game hunter 
stood him in good stead, but back of that 
were his naturalist's instincts, and his 
genuine love of all forms of wild life. 

I have been told that his ambition up to 
the time he went to Harvard had been to 
be a naturalist, but that there they seem 
to have convinced him that all the out-of- 
door worlds of natural history had been 
conquered, and that the only worlds re- 
40 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

maining were in the laboratory, and to be 
won with the microscope and the scalpel. 
But Roosevelt was a man made for action 
in a wide field, and laboratory conquests 
could not satisfy him. His instincts as a 
naturalist, however, lie back of all his 
hunting expeditions, and, in a large mea- 
sure, I think, prompt them. Certain it is 
that his hunting records contain more live 
natural history than any similar records 
known to me, unless it be those of Charles 
St. John, the Scotch naturalist-sportsman. 
The Canada jays, or camp-robbers, as 
they are often called, soon found out our 
camp that afternoon, and no sooner had 
the cook begun to throw out peelings and 
scraps and crusts than the jays began to 
carry them off, not to eat, as I observed, 
but to hide them in the thicker branches 
of the spruce trees. How tame they were, 
coming within three or four yards of one! 
Why this species of jay should everywhere 
41 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

be so familiar, and all other kinds so wild, 
is a puzzle. 

In the morning, as we rode down the 
valley toward our next camping-place, at 
Tower Falls, a band of elk containing a 
hundred or more started along the side of 
the hill a few hundred yards away. I was 
some distance behind the rest of the party, 
as usual, when I saw the President wheel 
his horse off to the left, and, beckoning to 
me to follow, start at a tearing pace on the 
trail of the fleeing elk. He afterwards told 
me that he wanted me to get a good view 
of those elk at close range, and he was 
afraid that if he sent the major or Hofer 
to lead me, I would not get it. I hurried 
along as fast as I could, which was not 
fast; the way was rough, — logs, rocks, 
spring runs, and a tenderfoot rider. 

Now and then the President, looking 
back and seeing what slow progress I was 
making, would beckon to me impatiently, 
42 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

and I could fancy him saying, **If I had 
a rope around him, he would come faster 
than that!" Once or twice I lost sight of 
both him and the elk; the altitude was 
great, and the horse was laboring like a 
steam engine on an upgrade. Still I urged 
him on. Presently, as I broke over a hill, 
I saw the President pressing the elk up 
the opposite slope. At the brow of the 
hill he stopped, and I soon joined him. 
There on the top, not fifty yards away, 
stood the elk in a mass, their heads to- 
ward us and their tongues hanging out. 
They could run no farther. The President 
laughed like a boy. The spectacle meant 
much more to him than it did tome. I had 
never seen a wild elk till on this trip, but 
they had been among the notable game 
that he had hunted. He had traveled 
hundreds of miles, and undergone great 
hardships, to get within rifle range of 
these creatures. Now here stood scores 
43 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

of them with lolKng tongues, begging for 
mercy. 

After gazing at them to our hearts' con- 
tent, we turned away to look up our com- 
panions, who were nowhere within sight. 
We finally spied them a mile or more away, 
and, joining them, all made our way to 
an elevated plateau that commanded an 
open landscape three or four miles across. 
It was high noon, and the sun shone clear 
and warm. From this lookout we saw 
herds upon herds of elk scattered over 
the slopes and gentle valleys in front of 
us. Some were grazing, some were stand- 
ing or lying upon the ground, or upon the 
patches of snow. Through our glasses we 
counted the separate bands, and then the 
numbers of some of the bands or groups, 
and estimated that three thousand elk 
were in full view in the landscape around 
us. It was a notable spectacle. Afterward, 
in Montana, I attended a council of In- 
44 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

dian chiefs at one of the Indian agencies, 
and told them, through their interpreter, 
that I had been with the Great Chief in 
the Park, and of the game we had seen. 
When I told them of these three thou- 
sand elk all in view at once, they grunted 
loudly, whether with satisfaction or with 
incredulity, I could not tell. 

In the midst of this great game amphi- 
theatre we dismounted and enjoyed the 
prospect. And the President did an un- 
usual thing, he loafed for nearly an hour, 
— stretched himself out in the sunshine 
upon a flat rock, as did the rest of us, and, 
I hope, got a few winks of sleep. I am 
sure I did. Little, slender, striped chip- 
munks, about half the size of ours, were 
scurrying about; but I recall no other wild 
things save the elk. 

From here we rode down the valley to 
our third camp, at Tower Falls, stopping 
on the way to eat our luncheon on a 
45 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

washed boulder beside a creek. On this 
ride I saw my first and only badger; he 
stuck his striped head out of his hole in 
the ground only a few yards away from 
us as we passed. 

Our camp at Tower Falls was amid 
the spruces above a canon of the Yellow- 
stone, five or six hundred feet deep. It 
was a beautiful and impressive situation, 
— shelter, snugness, even cosiness, — 
looking over the brink of the awful and 
the terrifying. With a run and a jump I 
think one might have landed in the river 
at the bottom of the great abyss, and in 
doing so might have scaled one of those 
natural obelisks or needles of rock that 
stand up out of the depths two or three 
hundred feet high. Nature shows you 
what an enormous furrow her plough can 
open through the strata when moving 
horizontally, at the same time that she 
shows you what delicate and graceful 
46 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

columns her slower and gentler aerial 
forces can carve out of the piled strata. 
At the Falls there were two or three of 
these columns, like the picket-pins of the 
elder gods. 

Across the canon in front of our camp, 
upon a grassy plateau which was faced 
by a wall of trap rock, apparently thirty 
or forty feet high, a band of mountain 
sheep soon attracted our attention. They 
were within long rifle range, but were not 
at all disturbed by our presence, nor had 
they been disturbed by the road-builders 
who, under Captain Chittenden, were 
constructing a government road along 
the brink of the caiion. We speculated 
as to whether or not the sheep could get 
down the almost perpendicular face of 
the chasm to the river to drink. It seemed 
to me impossible. Would they try it while 
we were there to see ? We all hoped so ; 
and sure enough, late in the afternoon 
47 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

the word came to our tents that the sheep 
were coming down. The President, with 
coat off and a towel around his neck, was 
shaving. One side of his face was half 
shaved, and the other side lathered. Hofer 
and I started for a point on the brink of the 
canon where we could have a better view. 

''By Jove," said the President, ''I 
must see that. The shaving can wait, and 
the sheep won't." 

So on he came, accoutred as he was, — 
coatless, hatless, but not latherless, nor 
towelless. Like the rest of us, his only 
thought was to see those sheep do their 
''stunt." With glasses in hand, we watched 
them descend those perilous heights, leap- 
ing from point to point, finding a foothold 
where none appeared to our eyes, loosen- 
ing fragments of the crumbling rocks as 
they came, now poised upon some narrow 
shelf and preparing for the next leap, zig- 
zagging or plunging straight down till the 
48 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

bottom was reached, and not one accident 
or misstep amid all that insecure footing. 
I think the President was the most pleased 
of us all ; he laughed with the delight of it, 
and quite forgot his need of a hat and coat 
till I sent for them. 

In the night we heard the sheep going 
back; we could tell by the noise of the 
falling stones. In the morning I confi- 
dently expected to see some of them lying 
dead at the foot of the cliffs, but there 
they all were at the top once more, ap- 
parently safe and sound. They do, how- 
ever, occasionally meet with accidents in 
their perilous climbing, and their dead 
bodies have been found at the foot of the 
rocks. Doubtless some point of rock to 
which they had trusted gave way, and 
crushed them in the descent, or fell upon 
those in the lead. 

The next day, while the rest of us went 
fishing for trout in the Yellowstone, three 
49 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

or four miles above the camp, over the 
roughest trail that we had yet traversed 
on horseback, the President, who never 
fishes unless put to it for meat, went off 
alone again with his lunch in his pocket, 
to stalk those sheep as he had stalked the 
elk, and to feel the old sportsman's thrill 
without the use of firearms. To do this 
involved a tramp of eight or ten miles 
down the river to a bridge and up the 
opposite bank. This he did, and ate his 
lunch near the sheep, and was back in 
camp before we were. 

We took some large cut-throat trout, 
as they are called, from the yellow mark 
across their throats, and I saw at short 
range a black-tailed deer bounding along 
in that curious, stiff-legged, mechanical, 
yet springy manner, apparently all four 
legs in the air at once, and all four feet 
reaching the ground at once, affording a 
very singular spectacle. 
50 












^ 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

We spent two nights in our Tower Falls 
camp, and on the morning of the third 
day set out on our return to Fort Yellow- 
stone, pausing at Yancey's on our way, 
and exchanging greetings with the old 
frontiersman, who died a few weeks later. 

While in camp we always had a big fire 
at night in the open near the tents, and 
around this we sat upon logs or camp- 
stools, and listened to the President's talk. 
What a stream of it he poured forth! and 
what a varied and picturesque stream! 
— anecdote, history, science, politics, ad- 
venture, literature; bits of his experience 
as a ranchman, hunter. Rough Rider, 
legislator, civil service commissioner, po- 
lice commissioner, governor, president, 
— the frankest confessions, the most tell- 
ing criticisms, happy characterizations 
of prominent political leaders, or foreign 
rulers, or members of his own Cabinet; 
always surprising by his candor, aston- 
51 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

ishing by his memory, and diverting by 
his humor. His reading has been very 
wide, and he has that rare type of mem- 
ory which retains details as well as mass 
and generalities. One night something 
started him off on ancient history, and 
one would have thought he was just fresh 
from his college course in history, the dates 
and names and events came so readily. 
Another time he discussed palaeontology, 
and rapidly gave the outlines of the science, 
and the main facts, as if he had been read- 
ing up on the subject that very day. He 
sees things as wholes, and hence the re- 
lation of the parts comes easy to him. 

At dinner, at the White House, the 
night before we started on the expedition, 
I heard him talking with a guest, — an 
officer of the British army, who was just 
back from India. And the extent and va- 
riety of his information about India and 
Indian history and the relations of the 
52 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

British government to it were extraor- 
dinary. It put the British major on his 
mettle to keep pace with him. 

One night in camp he told us the story 
of one of his Rough Riders who had just 
written him from some place in Arizona. 
The Rough Riders, wherever they are 
now, look to him in time of trouble. This 
one had come to grief in Arizona. He was 
in jail. So he wrote the President, and 
his letter ran something like this : — 

'*Dear Colonel, — I am in trouble. 
I shot a lady in the eye, but I did not in- 
tend to hit the lady; I was shooting at my 
wife." 

And the presidential laughter rang out 
over the tree-tops. To another Rough 
Rider, who was in jail, accused of horse 
stealing, he had loaned two hundred 
dollars to pay counsel on his trial, and, 
to his surprise, in due time the money 
53 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

came back. The ex-Rough wrote that his 
trial never came off. " We elected our dis- 
trict attorney;^' and the laughter again 
sounded, and drowned the noise of the 
brook near by. 

On another occasion we asked the Pre- 
sident if he was ever molested by any of 
the *'bad men" of the frontier, with whom 
he had often come in contact. "Only 
once," he said. The cowboys had always 
treated him with the utmost courtesy, 
both on the round-up and in camp; "and 
the few real desperadoes I have seen were 
also perfectly polite." Once only was he 
maliciously shot at, and then not by a 
cowboy nor a bona fide "bad man," but 
by a "broad-hatted ruffian of a cheap and 
common-place type." He had been com- 
pelled to pass the night at a little frontier 
hotel where the bar-room occupied the 
whole lower floor, and was, in consequence, 
the only place where the guests of the 
54 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

hotel, whether drunk or sober, could sit. 
As he entered the room, he saw that every 
man there was being terrorized by a half- 
drunken ruffian who stood in the middle 
of the floor with a revolver in each hand, 
compelling different ones to treat. 

"I went and sat down behind the stove," 
said the President, *'as far from him as I 
could get; and hoped to escape his notice. 
The fact that I wore glasses, together 
with my evident desire to avoid a fight, 
apparently gave him the impression that 
I could be imposed upon with impunity. 
He very soon approached me, flourishing 
his two guns, and ordered me to treat. I 
made no reply for some moments, when 
the fellow became so threatening that I 
saw something had to be done. The 
crowd, mostly sheep-herders and small 
grangers, sat or stood back against the 
wall, afraid to move. I was unarmed, 
and thought rapidly. Saying, 'Wefl, if I 
55 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

must, I must/ 1 got up as if to walk around 
him to the bar, then, as I got opposite him, 
I wheeled and fetched him as heavy a 
blow on the chin-point as I could strike. 
He went down like a steer before the axe, 
firing both guns into the ceiling as he went. 
I jumped on him, and, with my knees on 
his chest, disarmed him in a hurry. The 
crowd was then ready enough to help me, 
and we hog-tied him and put him in an 
outhouse." The President alludes to this 
incident in his ''Ranch Life," but does not 
give the details. It brings out his mettle 
very distinctly. 

He told us in an amused way of the 
attempts of his political opponents at Al- 
bany, during his early career as a member 
of the Assembly, to besmirch his char- 
acter. His outspoken criticisms and de- 
nunciations had become intolerable to 
them, so they laid a trap for him, but he 
was not caught. His innate rectitude and 
56 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

instinct for the right course saved him, 
as it has saved him many times since. I 
do not think that in any emergency he has 
to debate with himself long as to the right 
course to be pursued; he divines it by a 
kind of infallible instinct. His motives 
are so simple and direct that he finds a 
straight and easy course where another 
man, whose eye is less single, would floun- 
der and hesitate. 

One night he entertained us with remi- 
niscences of the Cuban War, of his efforts 
to get his men to the firing line when the 
fighting began, of his greenness and gen- 
eral ignorance of the whole business of 
war, which in his telling was very amus- 
ing. He has probably put it all in his book 
about the war, a work I have not yet read. 
He described the look of the slope of Kettle 
Hill when they were about to charge up it, 
how the grass was combed and rippled by 
the storm of rifle bullets that swept down 
57 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

it. He said, "I was conscious of being 
pale when I looked at it and knew that in 
a few moments we were going to charge 
there." The men of his regiment were all 
lying flat upon the ground, and it became 
his duty to walk along their front and en- 
courage them and order them up on their 
feet. ''Get up, men, get up!" One big 
fellow did not rise. Roosevelt stooped 
down and took hold of him and ordered 
him up. Just at that moment a bullet 
struck the man and went the entire length 
of him. He never rose. 

On this or on another occasion when 
a charge was ordered, he found himself a 
hundred yards or more in advance of his 
regiment, with only the color bearer and 
one corporal with him. He said they 
planted the flag there, while he rushed 
back to fetch the men. He was evidently 
pretty hot. ''Can it be that you flinched 
when I led the way ! " and then they came 
58 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

with a rush. On the summit of Kettle 
Hill he was again in advance of his men, 
and as he came up, three Spaniards rose 
out of the trenches and deliberately fired 
at him at a distance of only a few paces, 
and then turned and fled. But a bullet 
from his revolver stopped one of them. 
He seems to have been as much exposed to 
bullets in this engagement as Washington 
was at Braddock's defeat, and to have 
escaped in the same marvelous manner. 

The President unites in himself powers 
and qualities that rarely go together. 
Thus, he has both physical and moral 
courage in a degree rare in history. He 
can stand calm and unflinching in the 
path of a charging grizzly, and he can 
confront with equal coolness and deter- 
mination the predaceous corporations 
and money powers of the country. 

He unites the qualities of the man of 
action with those of the scholar and writer, 
59 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

— another very rare combination. He 
unites the instincts and accompHshments 
of the best breeding and culture with the 
broadest democratic sympathies and af- 
fihations. He is as happy with a frontiers- 
man Hke Seth Bullock as with a fellow 
Harvard man, and Seth Bullock is happy, 
too. 

He unites great austerity with great 
good nature. He unites great sensibility 
with great force and will power. He loves 
solitude, and he loves to be in the thick 
of the fight. His love of nature is equaled 
only by his love of the ways and marts of 
men. 

He is doubtless the most vital man on 
the continent, if not on the planet, to-day. 
He is many-sided, and every side throbs 
with his tremendous life and energy; the 
pressure is equal all around. His inter- 
ests are as keen in natural history as in 

economics, in literature as in statecraft, 

60 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

in the young poet as in the old soldier, 
in preserving peace as in preparing for 
war. And he can turn all his great power 
into the new channel on the instant. His 
interest in the whole of life, and in the 
whole life of the nation, never flags for a 
moment. His activity is tireless. All the 
relaxation he needs or craves is a change 
of work. He is like the farmer's fields, 
that only need a rotation of crops. I 
once heard him say that all he cared 
about being President was just ''the big 
work." 

During this tour through the West, 
lasting over two months, he made nearly 
three hundred speeches; and yet on his 
return Mrs. Roosevelt told me he looked 
as fresh and unworn as when he left home. 

We went up into the big geyser region 
with the big sleighs, each drawn by four 
horses. A big snow-bank had to be shov- 
eled through for us before we got to the 
6i 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

Golden Gate, two miles above Mammoth 
Hot Springs. Beyond that we were at an 
altitude of about eight thousand feet, on 
a fairly level course that led now through 
woods, and now through open country, 
with the snow of a uniform depth of four 
or five feet, except as we neared the "for- 
mations,^' where the subterranean warmth 
kept the ground bare. The roads had 
been broken and the snow packed for us 
by teams from the fort, otherwise the 
journey would have been impossible. 

The President always rode beside the 
driver. From his youth, he said, this seat 
had always been the most desirable one to 
him. When the sleigh would strike the 
bare ground, and begin to drag heavily, 
he would bound out nimbly and take 
to his heels, and then all three of us — 
Major Pitcher, Mr. Childs, and myself — 
would follow suit, sometimes reluctantly 
on my part. Walking at that altitude is 
62 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

no fun, especially if you try to keep pace 
with such a walker as the President is. 
But he could not sit at his ease and let 
those horses drag him in a sleigh over 
bare ground. When snow was reached, 
we would again quickly resume our seats. 
As one nears the geyser region, he gets 
the impression from the columns of steam 
going up here and there in the distance — 
now from behind a piece of woods, now 
from out a hidden valley — that he is ap- 
proaching a manufacturing centre, or a 
railroad terminus. And when he begins 
to hear the hoarse snoring of ** Roaring 
Mountain,'' the illusion is still more com- 
plete. At Norris's there is a big vent 
where the steam comes tearing out of a 
recent hole in the ground with terrific 
force. Huge mounds of ice had formed 
from the congealed vapor all around it, 
some of them very striking. 

The novelty of the geyser region soon 
63 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

wears off. Steam and hot water are steam 
and hot water the world over, and the 
exhibition of them here did not differ, 
except in volume, from what one sees by 
his own fireside. The " Growler '^ is only 
a boiling tea-kettle on a large scale, and 
**01d Faithful" is as if the lid were to fly 
off, and the whole contents of the kettle 
should be thrown high into the air. To 
be sure, boiling lakes and steaming rivers 
are not common, but the new features 
seemed, somehow, out of place, and as if 
nature had made a mistake. One disliked 
to see so much good steam and hot water 
going to waste; whole towns might be 
warmed by them, and big wheels made 
to go round. I wondered that they had 
not piped them into the big hotels which 
they opened for us, and which were 
warmed by wood fires. 

At Norris's the big room that the Presi- 
dent and I occupied was on the ground 
64 




^'3^- .VM^^^^awii 



SUNRISE IN YELLOWSTONE PARK. 

From stereograph, copyright 1904, by Underwood & Underwood, New York. 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

floor, and was heated by a huge box stove. 
As we entered it to go to bed, the Presi- 
dent said, "Oom John, don't you think 
it is too hot here ?" 

*'I certainly do," I replied. 

"Shall I open the window?" 

"That will just suit me." And he 
threw the sash, which came down to the 
floor, all the way up, making an opening 
like a doorway. The night was cold, but 
neither of us suffered from the abundance 
of fresh air. 

The caretaker of the building was a 
big Swede called Andy. In the morning 
Andy said that beat him: "There was 
the President of the United States sleeping 
in that room, with the window open to the 
floor, and not so much as one soldier out- 
side on guard." 

The President had counted much on 
seeing the bears that in summer board at 

the Fountain Hotel, but they were not yet 

65 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

out of their dens. We saw the track of 
only one, and he was not making for the 
hotel. At all the formations where the 
geysers are, the ground was bare over a 
large area. I even saw a wild flower — 
an early buttercup, not an inch high — 
in bloom. This seems to be the earliest 
wild flower in the Rockies. It is the only 
fragrant buttercup I know. 

As we were riding along in our big 
sleigh toward the Fountain Hotel, the 
President suddenly jumped out, and, 
with his soft hat as a shield to his hand, 
captured a mouse that was running along 
over the ground near us. He wanted it 
for Dr. Merriam, on the chance that it 
might be a new species. While we all 
went fishing in the afternoon, the Presi- 
dent skinned his mouse, and prepared 
the pelt to be sent to Washington. It was 
done as neatly as a professed taxidermist 

would have done it. This was the only 
66 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

game the President killed in the Park. In 
relating the incident to a reporter while 
I was in Spokane, the thought occurred 
to me, Suppose he changes that u to an o, 
and makes the President capture a moose, 
what a pickle I shall be in ! Is it anything 
more than ordinary newspaper enterprise 
to turn a mouse into a moose ? But, luck- 
ily for me, no such metamorphosis hap- 
pened to that little mouse. It turned out 
not to be a new species, as it should have 
been, but a species new to the Park. 

I caught trout that afternoon, on the 
edge of steaming pools in the Madison 
River that seemed to my hand almost 
blood-warm. I suppose they found better 
feeding where the water was warm. On 
the table they did not compare with our 
Eastern brook trout. 

I was pleased to be told at one of the 
hotels that they had kalsomined some of 
the rooms with material from one of the 
67 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

devil's paint-pots. It imparted a soft, deli- 
cate, pinkish tint, not at all suggestive of 
things Satanic. 

One afternoon at Norris's, the Presi- 
dent and I took a walk to observe the 
birds. In the grove about the barns there 
was a great number, the most attractive 
to me being the mountain bluebird. These 
birds we saw in all parts of the Park, and 
at Norris's there was an unusual num- 
ber of them. How blue they were, — 
breast and all ! In voice and manner they 
were almost identical with our bluebird. 
The Western purple finch was abundant 
here also, and juncos, and several kinds 
of sparrows, with an occasional Western 
robin. A pair of wild geese were feeding 
in the low, marshy ground not over one 
hundred yards from us, but when we 
tried to approach nearer they took wing. 
A few geese and ducks seem to winter in 
the Park. 

68 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

The second morning at Norris's one 
of our teamsters, George Marvin, sud- 
denly dropped dead from some heart af- 
fection, just as he had finished caring for 
his team. It was a great shock to us all. 
I never saw a better man with a team 
than he was. I had ridden on the seat 
beside him all the day previous. On one 
of the "formations" our teams had got 
mired in the soft, putty-like mud, and at 
one time it looked as if they could never 
extricate themselves, and I doubt if they 
could have, had it not been for the skill 
with which Marvin managed them. We 
started for the Grand Cafion up the Yel- 
lowstone that morning, and, in order to 
give myself a walk over the crisp snow in 
the clear, frosty air, I set out a little while 
in advance of the teams. As I did so, I 
saw the President, accompanied by one 
of the teamsters, walking hurriedly to- 
ward the barn to pay his last respects to 
69 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

the body of Marvin. After we had re- 
turned to Mammoth Hot Springs, he 
made inquiries for the young woman to 
whom he had been told that Marvin was 
engaged to be married. He looked her 
up, and sat a long time with her in her 
home, offering his sympathy, and speak- 
ing words of consolation. The act shows 
the depth and breadth of his humanity. 
At the Canon Hotel the snow was very 
deep, and had become so soft from the 
warmth of the earth beneath, as well as 
from the sun above, that we could only 
reach the brink of the Canon on skis. 
The President and Major Pitcher had 
used skis before, but I had not, and, 
starting out without the customary pole, 
I soon came to grief. The snow gave way 
beneath me, and I was soon in an awk- 
ward predicament. The more I struggled, 
the lower my head and shoulders went, 
till only my heels, strapped to those long 
70 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

timbers, protruded above the snow. To 
reverse my position was impossible till 
some one came and reached me the end 
of a pole, and pulled me upright. But I 
very soon got the hang of the things, and 
the President and I quickly left the super- 
intendent behind. I think I could have 
passed the President, but my manners 
forbade. He was heavier than I was, and 
broke in more. When one of his feet 
would go down half a yard or more, I 
noted with admiration the skilled diplo- 
macy he displayed in extricating it. The 
tendency of my skis was all the time to 
diverge, and each to go off at an acute 
angle to my main course, and I had con- 
stantly to be on the alert to check this 
tendency. 

Paths had been shoveled for us along 

the brink of the Canon, so that we got 

the usual views from the different points. 

The Canon was nearly free from snow, 

71 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

and was a grand spectacle, by far the 
grandest to be seen in the Park. The 
President told us that once, when pressed 
for meat, while returning through here 
from one of his hunting trips, he had 
made his way down to the river that we 
saw rushing along beneath us, and had 
caught some trout for dinner. Necessity 
alone could induce him to fish. 

Across the head of the Falls there was 
a bridge of snow and ice, upon which we 
were told that the coyotes passed. As the 
season progressed, there would come a 
day when the bridge would not be safe. 
It would be interesting to know if the 
coyotes knew when this time arrived. 

The only live thing we saw in the 
Canon was an osprey perched upon a 
rock opposite us. 

Near the falls of the Yellowstone, as at 
other places we had visited, a squad of 
soldiers had their winter quarters. The 
72 




< 1 






X S 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

President called on them, as he had called 
upon the others, looked over the books 
they had to read, examined their house- 
keeping arrangements, and conversed 
freely with them. 

In front of the hotel were some low hills 
separated by gentle valleys. At the Presi- 
dent's suggestion, he and I raced on our 
skis down those inclines. We had only to 
stand up straight, and let gravity do the 
rest. As we were going swiftly down 
the side of one of the hills, I saw out of 
the corner of my eye the President taking 
a header into the snow. The snow had 
given way beneath him, and nothing 
could save him from taking the plunge. 
I don't know whether I called out, or 
only thought, something about the down- 
fall of the administration. At any rate, 
the administration was down, aad pretty 
well buried, but it was quickly on its feet 
again, shaking off the snow with a boy's 
73 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

laughter. I kept straight on, and very 
soon the laugh was on me, for the treach- 
erous snow sank beneath me, and I took 
a header, too. 

"'Who is laughing now, Oom John?'" 
called out the President. 

The spirit of the boy was in the air 
that day about the Canon of the Yellow- 
stone, and the biggest boy of us all was 
President Roosevelt. 

The snow was getting so soft in the 
middle of the day that our return to the 
Mammoth Hot Springs could no longer 
be delayed. Accordingly, we were up in 
the morning, and ready to start on the 
home journey, a distance of twenty miles, 
by four o'clock. The snow bore up the 
horses well till mid-forenoon, when it 
began to give way beneath them. But 
by very careful management we pulled 
through without serious delay, and were 
back again at the house of Major Pitcher 
74 



CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 

in time for luncheon, being the only out- 
siders who had ever made the tour of the 
Park so early in the season. 

A few days later I bade good-by to the 
President, who went on his way to Cali- 
fornia, while I made a loop of travel to 
Spokane, and around through Idaho and 
Montana, and had glimpses of the great, 
optimistic, sunshiny West that I shall not 
soon forget. 



PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT AS A 

NATURE-LOVER AND 

OBSERVER 



PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 

AS A NATURE-LOVER 

AND OBSERVER 

Our many-sided President has a side 
to his nature of which the public has 
heard but Httle, and which, in view of 
his recent criticism of what he calls the 
nature fakirs, is of especial interest and 
importance. I refer to his keenness and 
enthusiasm as a student of animal life, 
and his extraordinary powers of observa- 
tion. The charge recently made against 
him that he is only a sportsman and has 
only a sportsman's interest in nature is 
very wide of the mark. Why, I cannot 
now recall that I have ever met a man 
with a keener and more comprehensive 
interest in the wild life about us — an 
interest that is at once scientific and 
79 



PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 

thoroughly human. And by human I do 
not mean anything akin to the sentiment- 
aHsm that sicklies o'er so much of our 
more recent natural history writing, and 
that inspires the founding of hospitals 
for sick cats; but I mean his robust, 
manly love for all open-air life, and his 
sympathetic insight into it. When I first 
read his "'Wilderness Hunter,'' many 
years ago, I was impressed by his rare 
combination of the sportsman and the 
naturalist. When I accompanied him on 
his trip to the Yellowstone Park in April, 
1903, I got a fresh impression of the ex- 
tent of his natural history knowledge and 
of his trained powers of observation. No- 
thing escaped him, from bears to mice, 
from wild geese to chickadees, from elk 
to red squirrels; he took it all in, and he 
took it in as only an alert, vigorous mind 
can take it in. On that occasion I was 
able to help him identify only one new 
80 



NATURE-LOVER AND OBSERVER 

bird, as I have related in the foregoing 
chapter. All the other birds he recog- 
nized as quickly as I did. 

During a recent half-day spent with 
the President at Sagamore Hill I got a 
still more vivid impression of his keen- 
ness and quickness in all natural history 
matters. The one passion of his life 
seemed natural history, and the appear- 
ance of a new warbler in his woods — 
new in the breeding season on Long 
Island — seemed an event that threw the 
affairs of state and of the presidential 
succession quite into the background. 
Indeed, he fairly bubbled over with de- 
light at the thought of his new birds and 
at the prospect of showing them to his 
visitors. He said to my friend who ac- 
companied me, John Lewis Childs, of 
Floral Park, a former State Senator, that 
he could not talk politics then, he wanted 

to talk and to hunt birds. And it was not 
8i 



PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 

long before he was as hot on the trail of 
that new warbler as he had recently been 
on the trail of some of the great trusts. 
Fancy a President of the United States 
stalking rapidly across bushy fields to 
the woods, eager as a boy and filled with 
the one idea of showing to his visitors the 
black-throated green warbler! We were 
presently in the edge of the woods and 
standing under a locust tree, where the 
President had several times seen and 
heard his rare visitant. ''That's his note 
now," he said, and we all three recog- 
nized it at the same instant. It came from 
across a little valley fifty yards farther in 
the woods. We were soon standing under 
the tree in which the bird was singing, 
and presently had our glasses upon him. 
''There is no mistake about it, Mr. 
President," we both said; "it is surely 
the black-throated green," and he laughed 
in glee. "I knew it could be no other; 
82 



NATURE-LOVER AND OBSERVER 

there is no mistaking that song and those 
markings. 'Trees, trees, murmuring 
trees!' some one reports him as saying. 
Now if we could only find the nest;" but 
we did not, though it was doubtless not 
far off. 

Our warblers, both in color and in song, 
are bewildering even to the experienced 
ornithologist, but the President had mas- 
tered most of them. Not long before he 
had written me from Washington that he 
had just come in from walking with Mrs. 
Roosevelt about the White House grounds 
looking up arriving warblers. "Most of 
the warblers were up in the tops of the 
trees, and I could not get a good glimpse 
of them; but there was one with chestnut 
cheeks, with bright yellow behind the 
cheeks, and a yellow breast thickly 
streaked with black, which has puzzled 
me. Doubtless it is a very common kind 
which has for the moment slipped my 
83 



PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 

memory. I saw the Blackburnian, the 
summer yellowbird, and the black- 
throated green." The next day he wrote 
me that he had identified the puzzhng 
warbler; it was the Cape May. There is 
a tradition among newspaper men in 
Washington that a Cape May warbler 
once broke up a Cabinet meeting ; maybe 
this was that identical bird. 

At luncheon he told us of some of his 
ornithological excursions in the White 
House grounds, how people would stare 
at him as he stood gazing up into the 
trees like one demented. *'No doubt 
they thought me insane." ''Yes," said 
Mrs. Roosevelt, "and as I was always 
with him, they no doubt thought I was 
the nurse that had him in charge." 

In his "Pastimes of an American 

Hunter" he tells of the owls that in June 

sometimes came after nightfall about the 

White House. "Sometimes they flew 

84 



NATURE-LOVER AND OBSERVER 

noiselessly to and fro, and seemingly 
caught big insects on the wing. At other 
times they would perch on the iron awn- 
ing bars directly overhead. Once one of 
them perched over one of the windows 
and sat motionless, looking exactly like 
an owl of Pallas Athene." 

He knew the vireos also, and had seen 
and heard the white-eyed at his Virginia 
place, *'Pine Knot," and he described 
its peculiar, emphatic song. As I moved 
along with the thought of this bird in 
mind and its snappy, incisive song, as I 
used to hear it in the old days near Wash- 
ington, I fancied I caught its note in a 
dense bushy place below us. We paused 
to listen. "A catbird," said the President, 
and so we all agreed. We saw and heard 
a chewink. "Out West the chewink calls 
like a catbird," he observed. Continuing 
our walk, we skirted the edge of an or- 
chard. Here the President called our 
85 



PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 

attention to a high-hole's nest in a cavity 
of an old apple tree. He rapped on the 
trunk of the tree that we might hear the 
smothered cry for food of the young in- 
side. A few days before he had found 
one of the half-fledged young on the 
ground under the tree, and had managed 
to reach up and drop it back into the 
nest. "What a boiling there was in there/' 
he said, ''when the youngster dropped 
in!" 

A cuckoo called in a tree overhead, the 
first I had heard this season. I feared 
the cold spring had cut them off. "The 
yellow- billed, undoubtedly," the Presi- 
dent observed, and was confirmed by Mr. 
Childs. I was not certain that I knew 
the call of the yellow-billed from that of 
the black-billed. "We have them both," 
said the President, "but the yellow-billed 
is the more common." 

We continued our walk along a path 
86 



NATURE-LOVER AND OBSERVER 

that led down through a most delightful 
wood to the bay. Everywhere the marks 
of the President's axe were visible, as he 
had with his own hand thinned out and 
cleared up a large section of the wood. 

A few days previous he had seen some 
birds in a group of tulip-trees near the 
edge of the woods facing the water; he 
thought they were rose-breasted gros- 
beaks, but could not quite make them 
out. He had hoped to find them there 
now, and we looked and listened for 
some moments, but no birds appeared. 

Then he led us to a little pond in the 
midst of the forest where the night heron 
sometimes nested. A pair of them had 
nested there in a big water maple the year 
before, but the crows had broken them 
up. As we reached the spot the cry of 
the heron was heard over the tree-tops. 
''That is its alarm note," said the Presi- 
dent. I remarked that it was much like 
87 



PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 

the cry of the Httle green heron. ''Yes, 
it is, but if we wait here till the heron re- 
turns, and we are not discovered, you 
would hear his other more characteristic 
call, a hoarse quawk." 

Presently we moved on along another 
path through the woods toward the 
house. A large, wide-spreading oak at- 
tracted my attention — a superb tree. 

''You see by the branching of that 
oak," said the President, "that when it 
grew up this wood was an open field and 
maybe under the plough; it is only in fields 
that oaks take that form." I knew it was 
true, but my mind did not take in the fact 
when I first saw the tree. His mind acts 
with wonderful swiftness and complete- 
ness, as I had abundant proof that day. 

As we walked along we discussed many 

questions, all bearing directly or indirectly 

upon natural history. The conversation 

was perpetually interrupted by some bird- 

88 




A BIT OF WOODLAND ON THE SLOPE TOWARDS OYSTER BAY 

From stereograph, copyright 1907, by Underwood & Underwood, New York 



NATURE-LOVER AND OBSERVER 

note in the trees about us which we would 
pause to identify — the President's ear, 
I thought, being the most alert of the 
three. Continuing the talk, he dwelt upon 
the inaccuracy of most persons' seeing, 
and upon the unreliability as natural 
history of most of the stories told by 
guides and hunters. Sometimes writers 
of repute were to be read with caution. 
He mentioned that excellent hunting 
book of Colonel Dodge's, in which are 
described two species of the puma, one 
in the West called the *' mountain lion," 
very fierce and dangerous ; the other called 
in the East the *' panther," — a harmless 
and cowardly animal. ''Both the same 
species," said the President, " and almost 
identical in disposition." 

Nothing is harder than to convince a 

person that he has seen wrongly. The 

other day a doctor accosted me in the 

street of one of our inland towns to tell 

89 



PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 

me of a strange bird he had seen; the 
bird was blood-red all over and was in 
some low bushes by the roadside. Of 
course I thought of our scarlet tanager, 
which was then just arriving. No, he 
knew that bird with black wings and tail; 
this bird had no black upon it, but every 
quill and feather was vivid scarlet. The 
doctor was very positive, so I had to tell 
him we had no such bird in our state. 
There was the summer redbird common 
in the Southern States, but this place is 
much beyond its northern limit, and, be- 
sides, this bird is not scarlet, but is of a 
dull red. Of course he had seen a tana- 
ger, but in the shade of the bushes the 
black of the wings and tail had escaped 
him. 

This was simply a case of mis-seeing 
in an educated man; but in the untrained 
minds of trappers and woodsmen gener- 
ally there is an element of the supersti- 
90 



NATURE-LOVER AND OBSERVER 

tious, and a love for the marvelous, which 
often prevents them from seeing the wild 
life about them just as it is. They pos- 
sess the mythopoeic faculty, and they 
unconsciously give play to it. 

Thus our talk wandered as we wan- 
dered along the woods and field paths. 
The President brought us back by the 
corner of a clover meadow where he was 
sure a pair of red-shouldered starlings 
had a nest. He knew it was an unlikely 
place for starlings to nest, as they breed 
in marshes and along streams and in the 
low bushes on lake borders, but this pair 
had always shown great uneasiness when 
he had approached this plot of tall clover. 
As we drew near, the male starling ap- 
peared and uttered his alarm note. The 
President struck out to look for the nest, 
and for a time the Administration was 
indeed in clover, with the alarmed black- 
bird circling above it and showing great 
91 



PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 

agitation. For my part, I hesitated on the 
edge of the clover patch, having a farmer's 
dread of seeing fine grass trampled down. 
I suggested to the President that he was 
injuring his hay crop; that the nest 
was undoubtedly there or near there ; so 
he came out of the tall grass, and, after 
looking into the old tumbled-down barn 
— a regular early settler's barn, with 
huge timbers hewn from forest trees — 
that stood near by, and which the Presi- 
dent said he preserved for its picturesque- 
ness and its savor of old times, as well as 
for a place to romp in with his dogs and 
children, we made our way to the house. 

The purple finch nested in the trees 
about the house, and the President was 
greatly pleased that he was able to show 
us this bird also. 

A few days previous to our visit the 
children had found a bird's nest on the 
ground, in the grass, a few yards below 
92 




A PATH IN THE WOODS LEADING TO COLD SPRING HARBOR 

From stereograph, copyright 1907, by Underwood & Underwood, New York 



NATURE-LOVER AND OBSERVER 

the front of the house. There were young 
birds in it, and as the President had seen 
the grasshopper sparrow about there, he 
concluded the nest belonged to it. We 
went down to investigate it, and found 
the young gone and two addled eggs in 
the nest. When the President saw those 
eggs, he said: ''That is not the nest of the 
grasshopper sparrow, after all; those are 
the eggs of the song sparrow, though 
the nest is more like that of the vesper 
sparrow. The eggs of the grasshopper 
sparrow are much lighter in color — al- 
most white, with brown specks." For 
my part, I had quite forgotten for the 
moment how the eggs of the little sparrow 
looked or differed in color from those of 
the song sparrow. But the President has 
so little to remember that he forgets none 
of these minor things! His bird-lore 
and wood-lore seem as fresh as if just 
learned. 

93 

/ 



PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 

I asked him if he ever heard that rare 
piece of bird music, the flight song of the 
Dven-bird. ''Yes/' he repHed, *'we fre- 
quently hear it of an evening, while we 
are sitting on the porch, right down there 
at the corner of the woods." Now, this 
flight song of the oven-bird was unknown 
to the older ornithologists, and Thoreau, 
with all his years of patient and tireless 
watching of birds and plants, never iden- 
tified it; but the President had caught it 
quickly and easily, sitting on his porch 
at Sagamore Hill. I believe I may take 
the credit of being the first to identify 
and describe this song — back in the old 
"Wake Robin" days. 

In an inscription in a book the Presi- 
dent had just given me he had referred 
to himself as my pupil. Now I was to be 
his pupil. In dealing with the birds I 
could keep pace with him pretty easily, 
and, maybe, occasionally lead him; but 
94 



NATURE-LOVER AND OBSERVER 

when we came to consider big game and 
the animal hfe of the globe, I was no- 
where. His experience with the big game 
has been very extensive, and his acquaint- 
ance with the literature of the subject is 
far beyond my own; and he forgets no- 
thing, while my memory is a sieve. In 
his study he set before me a small bronze 
elephant in action, made by the famous 
French sculptor Barye. He asked me if I 
saw anything wrong with it. I looked it 
over carefully, and was obliged to confess 
that, so far as I could see, it was all right. 
Then he placed before me another, by a 
Japanese artist. Instantly I saw what was 
wrong with the Frenchman's elephant. 
Its action was like that of a horse or a 
cow, or any trotting animal — a hind 
and a front foot on opposite sides mov- 
ing together. The Japanese had caught 
the real movement of the animal, which 
is that of a pacer — both legs on the same 
95 



PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 

side at a time. What different effects the 
two actions gave the statuettes ! The free 
swing of the Japanese elephant you at 
once recognize as the real thing. The 
President laughed, and said he had never 
seen any criticism of Barye's elephant on 
this ground, or any allusion to his mistake ; 
it was his own discovery. I was fairly 
beaten at my own game of observation. 

He then took down a copy of his 
''Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail," 
and pointed out to me the mistakes the 
artist had made in some of his drawings 
of big Western game. 

*'Do you see anything wrong in the 
head of the pronghorn?" he asked, re- 
ferring to the animal which the hunter is 
bringing in on the saddle behind him. 
Again I had to confess that I could not. 
Then he showed me the mounted head 
of a pronghorn over the mantel in one of 
his rooms, and called my attention to the 
96 



NATURE-LOVER AND OBSERVER 

fact that the eye was close under the root 
of the horn, whereas in the picture the 
artist had placed it about two inches too 
low. And in the artist's picture of the 
pronghorn, which heads Chapter IX, he 
had made the tail much too long, as he 
had the tail of the elk on the opposite 
page. 

I had heard of Mr. Roosevelt's attend- 
ing a fair in Orange County, while he 
was Governor, where a group of mounted 
deer were exhibited. It seems the group 
had had rough usage, and one of the deer 
had lost its tail and a new one had been 
supplied. No one had noticed anything 
wrong with it till Mr. Roosevelt came 
along. "But the minute he clapped his 
eyes on that group," says the exhibitor, 
''he called out, 'Here, Gunther, what do 
you mean by putting a white-tail deer's 
tail on a black-tail deer ?" Such closeness 
and accuracy of observation even few 
97 



PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 

naturalists can lay claim to. I mentioned 
the incident to him, and he recalled it 
laughingly. He then took down a volume 
on the deer family which he had himself 
had a share in writing, and pointed out 
two mistakes in the naming of the pic- 
tures which had been overlooked. The 
picture of the ''white-tail in flight" was 
the black-tail of Colorado, and the picture 
of the black-tail of Colorado showed the 
black-tail of Columbia — the difference 
this time being seen in the branching of 
the horns. 

The President took us through his 
house and showed us his trophies of the 
chase — bearskins of all sorts and sizes 
on the floors, panther and lynx skins on 
the chairs, and elk heads and deer heads 
on the walls, and one very large skin of 
the gray timber wolf. We examined the 
teeth of the wolf, barely more than an 
inch long, and we all laughed at the idea 
98 



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A YEARLING IN THE APPLE ORCHARD 

From stereograph, copyright 1907, by Underwood & Underwood, New York 



NATURE-LOVER AND OBSERVER 

of its rcachin;^ the heart of a caribou 
through the breast by a snap, or any 
number of snaps, as it has been reported 
to do. I doubt if it could have reached 
the heart of a gobbler turkey in that way 
at a single snap. 

The President's interest in birds, and 
in natural history generally, dates from 
his youth. While yet in his teens he pub- 
lished a list of the birds of Franklin 
County, New York. He showed me a 
bird journal which he kept in Egypt 
when he was a lad of fourteen, and a 
case of three African plovers which he 
had set up at that time; and they were 
well done. 

Evidently one of his chief sources of 
pleasure at Sagamore Hill is the com- 
panionship of the birds. He missed the 
bobolink, the seaside finch, and the 
marsh wren, but his woods and grounds 
abounded in other species. He knew and 
99 



PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 

enjoyed not only all the more common 
birds, but many rarer and shyer ones 
that few country people ever take note 
of — such as the Maryland yellow-throat, 
the black and white creeper, the yellow- 
breasted chat, the oven-bird, the prairie 
warbler, the great crested flycatcher, the 
wood pewee, and the sharp-tailed finch. 
He enjoyed the little owls, too. **It is a 
pity the little-eared owl is called a screech 
owl. Its tremulous, quavering cry is not 
a screech at all, and has an attraction of 
its own. These little owls come up to the 
house after dark, and are fond of sitting 
on the elk's antlers over the gable. When 
the moon is up, by choosing one's posi- 
tion, the little owl appears in sharp out- 
line against the bright disk, seated on his 
many-tined perch." 

A few days after my visit he wrote me 
that he had identified the yellow-throated 
or Dominican warbler in his woods, the 

100 



NATURE-LOVER AND OBSERVER 

first he had ever seen. I had to confess 
to him that I had never seen the bird. It 
is very rare north of Maryland. The 
same letter records several interesting 
httle incidents in the wild hfe about him: 
*'The other night I took out the boys 
in rowboats for a camping-out expedi- 
tion. We camped on the beach under a 
low bluff near the grove where a few 
years ago on a similar expedition we saw 
a red fox. This time two young foxes, 
evidently this year's cubs, came around 
the camp half a dozen times during the 
night, coming up within ten yards of the 
fire to pick up scraps and seeming to be 
very little bothered by our presence. Yes- 
terday on the tennis ground I found a 
mole shrew. He was near the side lines 
first. I picked him up in my handker- 
chief, for he bit my hand, and after we 
had all looked at him I let him go; but 
in a few minutes he came back and delib- 

lOI 



PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 

erately crossed the tennis grounds by the 
net. As he ran over the level floor of the 
court, his motion reminded all of us of 
the motion of those mechanical mice that 
run around on wheels when wound up. 
A chipmunk that lives near the tennis 
court continually crosses it when the 
game is in progress. He has done it two 
or three times this year, and either he or 
his predecessor has had the same habit 
for several years. I am really puzzled 
to know why he should go across this 
perfectly bare surface, with the players 
jumping about on it, when he is not 
frightened and has no reason that I can 
see for going. Apparently he grows ac- 
customed to the players and moves about 
among them as he would move about, for 
instance, among a herd of cattle." 

The President is a born nature-lover, 
and he has what does not always go with 
this passion — remarkable powers of ob- 

102 



NATURE-LOVER AND OBSERVER 

servation. He sees quickly and surely, 
not less so with the corporeal eye than 
with the mental. His exceptional vital- 
ity, his awareness all around, gives the 
clue to his powers of seeing. The chief 
qualification of a born observer is an 
alert, sensitive, objective type of mind, 
and this Roosevelt has in a preeminent 
degree. 

You may know the true observer, not 
by the big things he sees, but by the 
little things; and then not by the things 
he sees with effort and premeditation, but 
by his effortless, unpremeditated seeing — 
the quick, spontaneous action of his mind 
in the presence of natural objects. Every- 
body sees the big things, and anybody can 
go out with note-book and opera-glass and 
make a dead set at the birds, or can go 
into the northern forests and interview 
guides and trappers and Indians, and 
stare in at the door of the " school of the 
103 



PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 

woods." None of these things evince 
powers of observation; they only evince 
industry and intention. In fact, born ob- 
servers are about as rare as born poets. 
Plenty of men can see straight and report 
straight what they see; but the men who 
see what others miss, who see quickly 
and surely, who have the detective eye, 
like Sherlock Holmes, who "get the 
drop," so to speak, on every object, who 
see minutely and who see whole, are rare 
indeed. 

President Roosevelt comes as near 
fulfilling this ideal as any man I have 
known. His mind moves with wonderful 
celerity, and yet as an observer he is 
very cautious, jumps to no hasty conclu- 
sions. 

He had written me, toward the end of 
May, that while at Pine Knot in Vir- 
ginia he had seen a small flock of pas- 
senger pigeons. As I had been following 
104 



NATURE-LOVER AND OBSERVER 

up the reports of wild pigeons from vari- 
ous parts of our own state during the 
past two or three years, this statement of 
the President's made me prick up my 
ears. In my reply I said, "I hope you are 
sure about those pigeons," and I told 
him of my interest in the subject, and 
also how all reports of pigeons in the 
East had been discredited by a man in 
Michigan who was writing a book on the 
subject. This made him prick up his 
ears, and he replied that while he felt very 
certain he had seen a small band of the 
old wild pigeons, yet he might have been 
deceived; the eye sometimes plays one 
tricks. He said that in his old ranch days 
he and a cowboy companion thought one 
day that they had discovered a colony of 
black prairie dogs, thanks entirely to the 
peculiar angle at which the light struck 
them. He said that while he was Presi- 
dent he did not want to make any state- 
105 



PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 

ment, even about pigeons, for the truth 
of which he did not have good evidence. 
He would have the matter looked into by 
a friend at Pine Knot upon whom he 
could depend. He did so, and convinced 
himself and me also that he had really 
seen wild pigeons. I had the pleasure of 
telling him that in the same mail with 
his letter came the news to me of a large 
flock of wild pigeons having been seen 
near the Beaverkill in Sullivan County, 
New York. While he was verifying his 
observation I was in Sullivan County 
verifying this report. I saw and ques- 
tioned persons who had seen the pigeons, 
and I came away fully convinced that a 
flock of probably a thousand birds had 
been seen there late in the afternoon of 
May 23. ''You need have no doubt 
about it," said the most competent 
witness, an old farmer. "I lived here 
when the pigeons nested here in count- 
106 



NATURE-LOVER AND OBSERVER 

less numbers forty years ago. I know 
pigeons as I know folks, and these were 
pigeons." 

I mention this incident of the pigeons 
because I know that the fact that they 
have been lately seen in considerable 
numbers will be good news to a large 
number of readers. 

The President's nature-love is deep 
and abiding. Not every bird student 
succeeds in making the birds a part of 
his life. Not till you have long and sym- 
pathetic intercourse with them, in fact, 
not till you have loved them for their own 
sake, do they enter into and become a 
part of your life. I could quote many 
passages from President Roosevelt's 
books which show how he has felt and 
loved the birds, and how discriminating 
his ear is with regard to their songs. Here 
is one: — 

"The meadow-lark is a singer of a 
107 



PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 

higher order [than the plains skylark], 
deserving to rank with the best. Its song 
has length, variety, power, and rich mel- 
ody, and there is in it sometimes a ca- 
dence of wild sadness inexpressibly touch- 
ing. Yet I cannot say that either song 
would appeal to others as it appeals to me; 
for to me it comes forever laden with a 
hundred memories and associations — 
with the sight of dim hills reddening in 
the dawn, with the breath of cool morn- 
ing winds blowing across lonely plains, 
with the scent of flowers on the sunlit 
prairie, with the motion of fiery horses, 
with all the strong thrill of eager and 
buoyant life. I doubt if any man can 
judge dispassionately the bird-songs of 
his own country; he cannot disassociate 
them from the sights and sounds of the 
land that is so dear to him." 

Here is another, touching upon some 
European song-birds as compared with 
io8 



NATURE-LOVER AND OBSERVER 

some of our own: *'Noone can help lik- 
ing the lark; it is such a brave, honest, 
cheery bird, and moreover its song is ut- 
tered in the air, and is very long-sustained. 
But it is by no means a musician of the 
first rank. The nightingale is a performer 
of a very different and far higher or- 
der; yet though it is indeed a notable and 
admirable singer, it is an exaggeration 
to call it unequaled. In melody, and 
above all in that finer, higher melody 
where the chords vibrate with the touch 
of eternal sorrow, it cannot rank with 
such singers as the wood-thrush and 
the hermit-thrush. The serene ethereal 
beauty of the hermit's song, rising and 
falling through the still evening, under 
the archways of hoary mountain forests 
that have endured from time everlasting; 
the golden, leisurely chiming of the wood- 
thrush, sounding on June afternoons, 
stanza by stanza, through the sun-flecked 
109 



PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 

groves of tall hickories, oaks, and chest- 
nuts; with these there is nothing in the 
nightingale's song to compare. But in 
volume and continuity, in tuneful, volu- 
ble, rapid outpouring and ardor, above 
all in skillful and intricate variation of 
theme, its song far surpasses that of 
either of the thrushes. In all these re- 
spects it is more just to compare it with 
the mocking-bird's, which, as a rule, like- 
wise falls short precisely on those points 
where the songs of the two thrushes 
excel." 

In his "Pastimes of an American 
Hunter" he says: *'It is an incalculable 
added pleasure to any one's sense of hap- 
piness if he or she grows to know, even 
slightly and imperfectly, how to read and 
enjoy the wonder-book of nature. All 
hunters should be nature-lovers. It is to 
be hoped that the days of mere wasteful, 
boastful slaughter are past^ and that 
no 



KATURE-LOVER AND OBSERVER 

from now on the hunter will stand fore- 
most in working for the preservation and 
perpetuation of the wild life, whether big 
or little." Surely this man is the rarest 
kind of a sportsman. 



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